50 States, 50 Protests, 1 Movement. https://fiftyfifty.one/ | #fiftyfiftyone
This is an unofficial community related to the 50501 movement. Find the official communities at https://50501.chat/.
https://www.threads.net/@nprpubliceditor/post/DIhOEQQOyqP
EDIT: Also worth noting that the next nationwide protest date for 50501 is May 1st
News does not need to be sensational to be important.
News programs need to report what is important, not what they think will catch eyeballs
There is a balance to be struck. News has a few vital cogs in the machine that it cannot continue without. It needs reporters, editors, news to report, readers who are interested, and an income stream to keep it all running. It doesn't need to be profitable, but it does need to be sustainable. If you only ever report stories that nobody cares about, you will not make enough money to be sustainable. If you only report sensation, you will become corrupt. If you over-report on the same subject, readers will become numb to what you have to say. So while you are correct, news needs to report what is important, they also need to consider how their stories will impact their readers.
The message is that peaceful protests that don't involve property damage, and major disruption to business don't warrant respect or attention in America.
Within a capitalist system no one is going to pay any attention until you distrust the flow of capital in one form or another: stop traffic so people can’t go to work, shut down businesses, strike, slow down at work, target a CEO home, call in sick en masse.
Why would anyone pay attention if you’re just standing in a park holding signs?
Give it time. Women's Suffrage started pretty tame before the firebombs.
"Aren't news worthy enough"
News can and does keep dragging the same worthless news articles whenever they want so this is a lie
being the largest protest in us history makes it kinda newsworthy….
Did 50501 send Katy Perry to space? Checkmate.
good point, a washed up celebrity going… well not even to space but… good point, that’s some riveting, important news
That's like the entire purpose of a protests. How incredibly unethical of a journalist to even say something like this.
I love NPR but this stinks real bad. They should resign.
I love NPR but have been watching them slide right continually for most of my adult life. Then NPR outlets (not npr itself but still) took major donations from the Koch brothers.
:|
still probably the most factual news outlet but I temper my expectations.
Trump wanting to end PBS, NPR etc., calling them fake news does keep me supporting my local station tho.
I stopped donating when they aided the DNC in ignoring Bernie in 2016.
valid.
What a lazy hands-off way of reporting. What happened to walking in the crowd, interviewing protesters, interviewing innoconous passers-by, interviewing people that are hindered, ..., and also getting a reaction/quote from whomever/whatever is being protested against? Instead they apparently want to just publish some photos. That's not journalism, that's photography.
Photography is journalism.
Scroll through the Pulitzer winning photographs, and know that some of them have literally changed history. Pulitzer winning photographs from the Vietnam War turned political opinion on the war itself: 1969's Saigon Execution by Edward T. Adams, 1973's Terror of War by Nick Ut. 1977's The Soiling of Old Glory, was a key part in telling the story of what the state of the desegregation movement was at that time. 1994's The Vulture and the Little Girl (actually a boy) did make a difference in spurring increases in both private and government/NGO aid, and tragically played a big role in the photographer's suicide a year later.
There is a time and a place for words, for still photos, for video. Visual works like still photos are still incredibly important for journalism, especially coverage of things like demonstrations and protests.
I'm not against using photos in support of journalism, they absolutely make a difference, but photography alone is not journalism. Without a story, it's just photography. Your examples seem to have all been part of a bigger story.
My opinion is basically reflected in that quote you used: "a key part in telling the story of". While it was a key part, the photo alone was not the entire story.
I say this in good faith, and I have a friend at NPR and I don't hate them...
Should we protest at the news stations to make it easy for them to get pictures?
Seriously, would it work?
I have been saying this and I’m really glad to see others coming up with the same idea. News won’t come to us? Then we need to go to the news.
We need to march around their buildings, shout up at their windows, block access to their parking lots with our sheer numbers - make us impossible to ignore.
Isn't fox news in new york? Make their little spectacles outside a nightmare!
It's with doing anyway. They are the worst enablers of this madness.
My 2 cents. There isn't a cohesive reason for the protests so reporting on it will be muddy. Devil's advocate but it's the same reason occupy Wall Street failed. The message got watered down. If the media can't report on a clear, concise and unwavering requirement from the crowd then reporting on it is exceedingly hard to sell to the public.
If the media can report on Trump's incoherent rantings and make that sound like anything more than hot garbage, then they can absolutely do the same for protesters with varying causes, who are nowhere near as incoherent.
I'd like the journalists to do a tiny bit of actual work.
Report on what's happening, and do a rough headcount every now and then, report on the protest growing or waning.
It seems like journalists think they can't write 50,000 protesters showed up because actually there were 62,490 so it would be disastrous misinformation and it's better to post a picture, write "There's a protest." then forget about it.
Knowing how many are showing up each time matters. Knowing exactly how many doesn't really matter.
American jorunalist talking about their proffessional ethics is like a serial killer talking about their empathy.
They do need to be covered, though. The world needs to see that many here will never bend the knee and accept anything less than a real democracy.
This is why strikes are more newsworthy: they disrupt things.
With a protest news will cover:
After that, you're basically done, other than maybe taking some pictures of interesting signs or costumes.
With a strike you get all the above plus:
The disruption part is key, because disruptions lead to other disruptions and that leads to a new story.
Look at the coverage of the trash collectors' strike in Birmingham
Or look at the coverage of the transport strikes in Greece. Again, because a lot of things are being disrupted, there's more to talk about.
Part of the reason that disruption is key is that there's a long chain of side effects. For example, with the garbage strike there's uncollected garbage. That has a side effect of attracting rats and other vermin. People worry that that might have a side effect of causing disease outbreaks. That might have an effect on the already strained public health system.
In addition, the more disruption, the more pressure there is to fix it. That results in various people passing the buck / blame to other people, which results in more news-worthy things to write about. You get conflicts between different levels of government. Conflict is interesting, so it's something that makes the news.
A protest on the weekend that doesn't really disrupt anything just isn't going to get the same level of coverage.
11 days until May Day which would be the perfect opportunity for a really disruptive general strike. But, I guess Americans aren't concerned enough about the state of their country to really disrupt anything yet.
Protests too can be disruptive. They don't have to be just people along the side of the road, building, etc. For instance, here's thousands of people blocking a freeway in downtown LA as part of anti-ICE protests in February
(Did get more media coverage indeed due to being more disruptive)
Organizing a general strike is also more difficult in the US with union membership being so comparatively low. Greece and the UK both have around double the unionization rate (~20% vs ~10%). Not impossible, and would be great to see, but protests themselves are a tool that can help get there. Help people see that people within your community are just a pissed as you are and you'll have a lot more people willing to join in. Unions are some of the people organizing various protests too. They are able to drive membership up because of it
So what they're saying is... there's another way to get their attention. Challenge accepted.
It's the same excuse they use for not posting rape stories and knife attacks in germany, unless it is an immigrant of course.
I generally agree with the Argument of significance when there's about 100 rapes daily that you cant report everything, but the argument falls flat once they decide to still post them when it fuels division.
Maybe you could actually go see it so you don't have to report "hundreds of" or "several" protestors when many thousands showed up.
I'm not saying that she is intentionally being shitty, but there is a good chance her board is. This is a deep dive in who is on the board of NPR from last year. Scroll down to see NPR specifically and notice the bolded or linked people and who they're tied to.
Are there non-American news that are covering it?
I'm in Portugal and the anti-Trump protests in the US have been covered in prime time TV news here.
Not fully free from similar issues here. For instance, the BBC is massively downplaying turnout
The BBC is saying "thousands" were protesting on April 19th when others estimate in the range of 4 million. Counting people in photos on social media in just a handful of cities gives a figure higher than thousands. There were hundreds of protest locations
The BBC also claims there were "tens of thousands" on April 5th when it was estimated at 3-5 million. There were over 100 000 in DC and 100 000 in NYC alone on April 5th!